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Clayton Hardiman asks MLive/Chronicle readers if they would leave if they really couldn't come home again

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One of the two rovers used in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project is shown in this image released by NASA. The PBS "Nova" special "Mars: Dead or Alive" details the building and launch of a Mars-bound rover set to land on the red planet. A new project seeks volunteers to live -- and doe -- there.
(AP FILE PHOTO/NASA)

Someone invites you on an expedition. It’s an
opportunity to go, in the now-famous words of the “Star Trek” franchise,
where no one has gone before. You will be the first of your kind. When
you step off the vessel, yours will be the first feet to tread that
ground. For as far as you can see in any direction, the dust will be
free of footprints, endlessly pristine. Assuming there is air, it will
be air that, for all you know, has never entered a lung before.

What’s
the trick? you ask. The trick is it’s dangerous. The trick is you might
not live to complete the journey, much less the mission. The trick is
it’s never been done before.

And the ultimate trick is it’s a one-way ticket. You can‘t go home again.

Well, no need to suppose. The invitation has been issued.

The
Mars One project, a Dutch-based nonprofit organization whose goal is to
establish a permanent human colony on the red planet, has begun ground
work for the project, expected to begin about a decade from now.

Here's a sampling of what MLive and Muskegon Chronicle readers thought:

I still expect that mother necessity will make a way.
Because there is really no "need" to get to Mars, there is no effective
mode of transportation. If people are motivated to find a way home, I
expect that people will work together, share ideas and find a way. This
will require that people from different backgrounds, political systems,
(Communist and Capitalist, Democrat and Republicans and even Buckeyes,
Spartans and Wolverines) and beliefs lower their guards and accept the
ideas of others.

It's
all about transportation. In the fifty or so years of the space
program the best transportation NASA has come up with is to sit on top
of a giant can of combustible fuel and blast your way there. I would
think that all efforts should be focused 'how' to get to Mars.
Developing safe, efficient transportation to the stars would be the game
changer the people of earth need.